Prostate Cancer moved on me fast a few months ago. I blogged last September in Daily Kos about my Stage 4 diagnosis. I was in bed for awhile, with embarrassing tubes stuck into my formerly secret places.
Since then, The Doctor’s prescribed eleven prescription drugs a day for me, including powerful hormones, and pot.
The hormones stop my body’s production of testosterone. That is supposed to starve the cancer, which feeds on testosterone.
It’s working! The doctor says the cancer’s in remission. He’s removed all my tubes. God, that feels great!
I had smoked and ingested lots of pot; it helps me coast along amid tides of fears and emotions, which included side effects from the other 10 drugs.
But all of the support and good cheer that Daily Kossacks gave back to me with your comments, when I first wrote about my diagnosis in September, makes me feel even better than the pot.
Dozens of folks confided in their comments that they were experiencing various stages of their own cancers; from folks in full remission who fought it for a decade, to older men like myself with newly discovered prostate cancer. Some went to the doctor right away and discovered early, treatable cancer.
I responded to every comment. It’s only good manners. Most of us shared a cry together. That support helped me overcome a special kind of loneliness.
I’ll always marvel that so many folks whom I’ve only known through arguments over politics or discussing identifications of Coopers’ Hawks, would take the time to bare their own emotions in sympathy with my plight.
I’ll need to take these drugs and get an occasional shot, for the rest of my life. The cancer’s still present, but depleted. It’s now far more likely that I’ll die with it someday, rather than from it.
Many folks and some Front Pagers have also commented, or written in their own diaries, about how their own ailments figure in the national health care debate, in additional to their personal stress. That’s one more issue that connects us with each other, and with kossacks like ursulalaw and Durrati who themselves have serious surgery scheduled, and needed financial assistance.
It’s as if having a preexisting condition has become a political act, while Trump is using cancer research money to imprison children at the border.
Meanwhile, every new day is a blessing and I hope to read and write here about our political and personal battles and victories for many more years.
/signed/ Redwoodman.
PS: My original Cancer Sucks diary, from September 2018: www.dailykos.com/...